The Hermitage
Trip Start
Jan 26, 2008
1
11
36
Trip End
Feb 29, 2008
Saint Petersburg,
Russia
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Things in St Petersburg don't really get going until about 10:00am, so we got up a little latter than usual, had a leisurely breakfast at a local cafe, wrote a few postcards and then headed off to The Hermitage Museum at the Winter Palace, approximately 5 minutes walk from where we are staying. As is usual wherever you are in Moscow and St Petersburg, you are surrounded by the most amazing architecture and history. The entrance to the Winter Palace is off Dvortovaya Ploschad, in which sits Alexanders column. A temporary ice skating rink, like the one in Red Square in Moscow, has been set up here, surrounding the column. We took some pictures in the Ploschad (Square), of the Winter Palace and of the building opposite before heading into the Palace's courtyard and from their into the Hermitage Museum itself. We boought our tickets, payed an extra 100 roubles so we could take photos in the Museum, dropped off our coats and bags at the coat check and then went exploring
The Hermitage
. There was, of course, a grand staircase to climb and then we were in amongst the exhibits.I don't really know how to describe what we saw today. I read somewhere a comment by the current (I think) curator of the Hermitage Museum, he said "I am not sure if the Hermitage is the best museum in the world, but it is certainly not the second best". Another comment I read said that the only collection to surpass that of the Hermitage might be that in the Lourve. Some of things on display are coins, antiquities, paintings, sculpture, stonework, armour, jewellery, and glasswork, just to name a few. Added to that we happened to be visiting during a special exhibition that included paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir and Cezanne, plus others that have slipped my mind at the moment. There were Van Gough's, Picassos', Caravagio's and Matisse's. There were Assyrian, Babylonian and Eqyptian artifacts, There was a large collection of Byzantine artifacts, only half of which was open but what I did see was amazing. There were incredible numbers of italian and other European marble sculptures, many of the male figures had been censored at some point in their history with comical looking marble fig leaves having been placed strategically. As if the exhibits were not enough, the setting was just spectacular. The Winter Palace itself is worth the entrance fee even without the museum collection.
The Hermitage's Crown
The rooms are decorated in exquisite detail. The walls, doors and floors of the Palace are themselves priceless artworks in their own right. It is quite exhausting and overwhelming to explore the Hermitage. You enter one room and see priceless exhibits everywhere while being stunned at the beauty of the room itself. You then go to the next room where you see priceless exhibits everywhere while being stunned at the beauty of the room itself and this happens over and over again. There are literally hundreds of rooms to explore. We spent about four hours in the museum. We saw incredible artwork, priceless antiques, rare stonework and ancient artifacts. When we left we still had a feeling that we had left much of the Museum unexplored. We left, not because we had seen everything but because we still wanted to see so many ther things in St Petersburg.Leaving the Hermitage, we wandered down to the banks of the Neva river to take some pictures across the water of the Peter and Paul Fortress, thesite of the original settlement in St Petersburg. When then followed the river until we came to Ploschad Dekabristov and the famous statue of Peter the Great commissioned by Catherine the Great. This also provided us with a fabulous vista up to St Isaac's Cathedral. We also found the statue of Alexander the first which sits the other side of St Isaac's Cathedral. In previous editions of the blog I have spoken about the various books we have purchased during our time here
Inside the Hermitage
. Given we are about to head to Europe where we will be flying with EasyJet we needed to offload some baggage weight to ensure we don't get charged outrageous excess luggage fees. We headed to the St Petersburg Post office which is just near St Isaac's cathedral. Here we met a lovely young Russian lady who helped us package up and send off just over 4 kilograms of books which we had bought between the two of us, although I must confess that the majority of the books are mine. After the Post Office we headed to a supermarket, more on the scale of a local IGA that a Coles or Safeway, to get some things for dinner. After dinner we went out in search of a WiFi hotspot as the two previous editions of the blog still hadn't gone out as it has been more difficult to find WiFi access in St Petersburg than it was in Moscow. We eventually found a smokey pub a short distance from our Hostel which had free WiFi. We went in, ordered some coffee and tea, had some chocolate mousse for desert and I also tried a dark Russian beer which was very nice but packed a bit of a punch. After getting out fill of the internet it was back to the Hostel for the evening. Tomorrow we are off to the Russian State Museum and the Kazan Cathedral before catching our train to Riga tomorrow night. 
